Nov 15, 2005

Giganto!

As usual: paleoanthropology is on the freaking move. Just as the latest issue of Yeti Researcher hit the shelves comes a flurry of related news. First off, all them playa-hatin' Indonesian anthropoligists need to recognize: there was little tiny hobbits, OK, contemporaneous with modern humans, on the Isle of Flores. Homo Floresiensis is no microcephalic modern pygmy, and you know what's the proof? Because they found more of them.
Next up: Gigantopithecus Blackiis the 12-foot prehistoric ape that is 100% real, and which, say some, accounts for the Sasquatch story (or maybe even Sasquatch himself).

There's Giganto, as the big feller is lovingly called by his admirers, fending off some enterprising Home erectuses, the only human predecessors the ape would have known had he gone extinct by a million years ago as previously thought. But wait: new spadework reveals that Giganto was around as recently 100,000 years ago, i.e. alongside Homo sapiens sapiens, perhaps even like so:

Cryptozoologists will surely take heart. And so will the dino-creationists, who have become the latest monster-hunsters, driven by the belief that discovering Nessie and the Mokele-mbembe and the rest of In Search Of list somehow helps to prove biblical literalism. It's true.

A junior varsity football coach suspended for generating his players lie down within a アナスイ セール 財布 central New York cemetery as a postdefeat motivational ploy mentioned he borrowed the concept from a pivotal scene inside the ANNA SUI コスメ 店舗 NY coach suspended for taking players to cemetery アディダス オリジナルス リュック 2000 Denzel Washington film "Remember the Titans."

Craig Tice, superintendent of your Marcellus school district outside Syracuse, announced Thursday that coach Jim Marsh has been suspended for two weeks without the need of http://votenonov6.com/category/annasui NY coach suspended for taking players to cemetery ANNA SUI 財布 新作 2013 spend for last weekend's spurofthemoment stop at a rural cemetery.

Marsh's team was returning from a loss last http://heidicare.com/category/annasui Saturday at neighboring Skaneateles when he had the bus pull over at a cemetery and told the 24 players to lie down among adidas リュック 新作 NY coach suspended for taking players to cemetery ANNA SUI 財布 新作 2013 rows of graves. The coach then talked to them regarding the アシックス ランニングシューズ 2013 value of playing really hard.

Tice said some of http://getasleepdentist.com/category/adidas the players, who had been nonetheless in uniform, laid down on leading of graves at St. Francis Xavier cemetery, near the Marcellus college campus 12 miles southwest of Syracuse. Some parents complained to school officials immediately after being told by the players what had occurred.

Marsh apologized in the course of a meeting with players and their parents in the ANNA SUI 財布 新作 college ANNA SUI コスメ 店舗 Thursday evening, telling them he was looking to inspire the team by recreating a scene from "Remember the Titans," which told the story of a newly integrated Virginia higher school's football team in 1971, with Washington portraying the head coach.

Through one scene set in the team's preseason camp at Pennsylvania's Gettysburg College, the players cease to get a breather in a fogshrouded Civil War graveyard for the duration of a training run. Washington's character uses the setting to tell his players, black and white, to "take a lesson from the dead" and start playing together as a group or face defeat.

"I tried to seize an opportunity to inspire the team having a theme from Bear in mind the Titans,'" Marsh's statement to players and parents read. "My only believed was to bring them to a realization of what an incredible アシックスウォーキング アウトレット factor it's to become able to play football with your mates, and how terrific adidas リュック 新作 it would be to perform difficult and triumph the following Saturday."

"There have been plenty of critics but many アナスイ バッグ セール a lot more supporters" of Marsh's graveyard ploy, Tice told The Connected Press on Friday.

Marsh supplied to donate two weeks of coaching salary, $750, towards the cemetery for upkeep in the grounds, the superintendent stated.

The suspension has no bearing on Marsh's job as English teacher in the Marcellus high http://handsomelab.com/category/cheapannasui school or his role http://cedarcreekestatemt.com/category/toryburch because the coach with the school's boys' varsity basketball group, Tice stated.

"I usually do not regret the message of asking players and students to provide all that they have アシックス ランニングシューズ 2013 NY coach suspended for taking players to cemetery トリーバーチ 財布 公式 for themselves, their peers, and their community," Marsh stated in his statement. "I usually do not regret telling my students, my players, to become resilient when faced with challenges, to accept the duty for your actions, and to handle these issues adidas スニーカー レディース with class and dignity."

Articles in Print

The Zombie ZeitgeistA full scale movement is on the lurch. But why the best zombie movie ever made a video game?

Believer interview with Mark AllenDigital artist and awesome gallerist Mark Allen talks about Tekken Torture Tournament and other projects where people were wired to machines and did strange things in public.

Believer interview with Marjane SatrapiEnlightening Q & A with the Persian cartoonist, memoirist, quick conversationalist in which she declares: “THE WORLD IS NOT ABOUT BATMAN AND ROBIN FIGHTING THE JOKER; THINGS ARE MORE COMPLICATED THAN THAT.”

Yeti Researcher Yet another 100-page issue of the world's top academic journal devoted scholarship about the Yeti, Bigfoot, Sasqatch, and other mystery primates worldwide. For researchers and lay audiences alike, the latest YR features a history of Sasquatch sightings in southern California, an update on the wily orang pendek of Sumatra, and a new look into Teddy Roosevelt's obsession with bagging a Bigfoot. As Editor-in-Chief, I promise you won't be disappointed.

Readings

Panda PowerPoint! I guess I don't mind being "the entertainment" when it's at Mark Allen's second annual Holiday Fry-B-Que. Presented: preliminary findings from my ongoing research into the most charismatic megafauna of all: Giant Pandas.

McSweeny's Presents: The World, Explained | Dec 9, 2006For those who missed it, there will be more. World, Explained is going strong! Money was raised, laughs were had, and for those paying attention, small amounts of useful information about things like the aurora borealis were transmitted. Plus: Michael Cera = lovably funny. And Nick Diamonds' renditions of Dumb Dog and Hanging Tough are still in my head. As is that horribly catchy Fresh Step jam.

Jest Fest at Skylight BooksSomehow I wound up hosting the 10th anniversary jubilee for Infinite Jest at Skylight Books. Because who doesn't love a jubilee, right? Despite being delirious with Hepatitis A (that's the mild, non-lethal kind; I'm not at risk for Hep B since I always go the needle share and choose clean-looking prostitutes), I managed to not mis-pronounce anyone's name and make an erudite joke and poke gentle fun at Michael Silverblatt.

McSweeny's Presents: The World, Explained | June 10, 2006Number Three! Last one was sold out so we moved to a slightly larger theater. Andy Richter hosted, and his opening exegesis of CSI: Miami warmed the people up right. Evany Thomas presented her very scientific findings on the Secret Language of Sleep; Starlee Kine bared her neuroses to the world (or at least the 300 people in the audience); Josh Davis showed video of his 135-lb self sumo wrestling a 550-lb opera singer from San Bernardino; and Davy Rothbart closed it out with some Found Magazine magic. Grant Lee Phillips, Sam Shelton and Zooey Deschanel provided the music punctuation! I can still hear their rendition of We Are the Champions.

McSweeny's Presents: The World, Explained | Feb 11, 2006The second in our series of precision comedy and fact-based entertainment extravaganzas benefiting 826LA. Patton Oswalt was kind enough to host, and Jon Brion joined in on the piano and guitar as thematic accompaniment. Presenters included: David Rees, Michael Colton, John Hodgman (along with his hirsuit troubadour, Jonathan Coulton), and me. Plus: a fashion show of exciting multi-user garmentry.

Little Gray Book Lecture at GalapagosHow to Observe President's Day. Jonathan Coulton's technical wizardry has made this entire show available online. The summary from PRX: Sarah Vowell, John Hodgman and Joshuah Bearman on Presidents' Day, along with a fifteen-piece marching band and a new song about all forty-three presidents. My contribution? Yes, from Yeti Researcher. Again. Actually that was the first one. So I have only five stories!

July 25: TJ to LA -- A Night McSweeney's Readings I was honored to be part of a strange triptych along with Salvador Plascencia and Josh Kun. Sponsored, somehow, by La Ciudad magazine, we all packed into Beyond Baroque with no air conditions. 150 people showed at 7 o'clock on a Friday evening, which we took as a good sign of something. Sal held up and anxiously discussed drawings from his novel, Josh delivered an essay on the Dr. Moreau of Tijuana, and my shtick (again) was Pac Man and metaphysics, this time with fun slides.

October 8th: Skylight Books w/Stephen ElliottFun times were had by all. Someone in the audience actually mistook me for an expert on the psychology human character. We ate shrimp cocktail and drank cheap wine and laughed at Bush and celebrated the certainty of right besting wrong in American democracy. A lot of good that did.